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I’m Joel Muigai, a Heron AI Security Fellow based in Nairobi, Kenya. I’m working with Anthony(another fellow) and our mentor Guy who is a member of technical staff at from SL5 on a project we call enclave API. I’m requesting $1,000 to help me attend the Frontier AI Security Forum in Tel Aviv on 22 November and present what we have been working on.
Our project was asks the question below:
How can researchers and their coding agents can run useful experiments on a model without getting direct access to its weights?
We are looking at some of the tasks that researcher run, such as evaluations(evals), mech interp and training workflows (5 primitives). My contribution has been on authentication, job signing approvals and investigating CPU/GPU attestation.
The goals is to make useful research possible while reducing the risk of model weights being stolen or misused. We have a ready prototype, and some gaps we need to test but my presentation will be on progress so far.
I want to present the team’s design and current experiments, then potentially ask practitioners in the room where our assumptions fail. I’m preparing a short talk with feedback from the team. I will use the forum’s technical discussions and side chats, to get specific criticism that we can turn into changes and improvemenets to our design and evaluation plan.
I will share the presentation materials and write a short report within two weeks of the event, covering feedback received, unresolved questions and changes we plan to make. The outcome I foresee is concrete suggestions/feedback for tests or design changes.
This is purely an individual travel request to share our team’s work. The proposed request is $1000. Heron is funding flights and accommodation capped at $200 per night. However, Visa acquisition fees, Food and transportation in Israel will not be covered. This funds will go into covering those expenses both here in Kenya and in Israel. Below is the cost breakdown
Estimated Budget:
Visa, photos and supporting documents: $100
Meals not provided by organisers: $200
Airport transfers and local transport in Kenya and Israel: $250
Travel insurance: $100
Mobile data(roaming): $150
Reserve for price changes or travel disruption: $200
The enclave API is shared team work within the Heron fellowship. Anthony and I work on the implementation with guidance from Guy who is a member of the technical staff at Sl5. I have worked on Hardware security before under the guidance of Jonathan Happel as part of SPAR. This project is distinct in execution although some concepts overlap. For this project, I designed and implemented researcher authentication and signed job approvals, including a live Google Cloud KMS signing experiment. My work focused on carrying authorization through to execution, then testing rejection of altered or unauthorized requests, and investigating CPU/GPU attestation.
Our code and experiments: Enclave API repository.
The main risks are visa delays or travel disruption preventing me from attending, or discussions at the forum producing limited actionable feedback. I would prepare specific questions and arrange relevant conversations beforehand. If I cannot attend, I would share our presentation remotely and seek feedback through Heron.
I have not raised any grant funding in the past 12 months.
There are no bids on this project.